


Crystal

by starcunning



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: ? - Freeform, Angst, Crystal Exarch critical, Exarch probably wishes he had died in the course of events rather than live to face Shasi’s wrath, Fray is slow-clapping in the background, Gen, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Post-MSQ, Shadowbringers Spoilers, Shasiverse, i'm just saying ya boi did kind of kidnap your friends, it's like one big long argument
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-19 23:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19982314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starcunning/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: “I understand you have concerns you must see to,” said the Exarch. “Would that I could aid you with them, but much of my power is concentrated here. I thought it best that I use them to make this place a refuge—for all of them. For you. What can I do to make you feel more at home?”“Nothing,” Shasi said, through teeth she had not realized she had set. “I have a home. This is not it.”





	Crystal

It was not merely that the yawning expanse of the courtyard made her nervous—every eye in the city upon her, she could not help but feel—nor that it felt strange to come and go from the Oculus at will. Though the oppressive light in the sky had been gone for moons, save those few desperate days at the end, the heavens seemed too close, pressed down around her ears and upon her shoulders. Even in the tower, where passage restricted, she could not ease—she was not alone there, and there as a particular pair of eyes she always hoped to avoid. Entering the Oculus chamber at last, she held her breath as she crossed the inlaid floor like she was a child sneaking down to the larder for a midnight snack.

“X’shasi,” came the voice, and she froze. “I did not know you were in the city.” His timbre was warm and friendly, and made the hairs on the back of her neck prick up.  
“Exarch,” she said, turning to face him. He had another name, but he had refused to answer to it months ago and she did not care to return it to him in that moment. “I arrived but a bell ago, and in another bell I should be gone.” Or much sooner, if she had her druthers. The way back to the Source awaited, far more stable and more comfortable than casting her aether across infinite distances. “Unless there was something you required.”  
“I had asked Captain Lyna to pass on a request …”  
“I didn’t see her,” Shasi said. She longed to reach up, adjust the lay of her baldric, brush back her hair—to fidget, in so many words—but she swallowed the urge and regarded him, unmoving. “What is it?”  
“Since the threat of the Lightwardens has passed, and the Tower—and I—will be remaining here indefinitely, I have elected to allow Crystarium researchers the opportunity to plumb its depths and learn its secrets. However, not all of the Tower’s guardians still slumber, and I was hoping that you … and perhaps I … could clear a path for them.”  
A muscle in Shasi’s cheek feathered, recalling without wishing to a conversation held on the cliffs—the very moment when she had been no longer suspicious but _sure_ that he was lying to her. That they had met before. That she knew his name, the one she would not grant. “I’ll send word to Thancred,” she said. “He and I will take care of it. We’ve worked together on this sort of thing before.” A long time ago—and longer still for him. It would have felt nostalgic if she had not been in the grip of something else then.  
“What sort of thing?” the Exarch wondered.  
Shasi glanced aside, pressing her lips into a thin line. She thought of the wreckage of the _Ragnarok_ , of the subterranean remains of a city they had found once—destroyed, she was quite sure, by the selfsame earthquake that had once buried the Crystal Tower and the Allagan Empire’s influence—and of far more innocent days. “Exploration,” she said. “Neither of us have an academic background in Allagan studies,” she told the Exarch, each word growing sharper until they were pointed, needle-fine; “but he’s a dab hand at caving and rock climbing, and when he was allowed only light field-work we would go together.”  
“Ah,” the Exarch said. “He is not with you, then, in the latest ruin you’ve taken to exploring?” His tone was neutral, detached, but his crimson eyes narrowed just slightly as he said it.  
Shasi felt a sudden chill take her, as though the winds of Coerthas blew over her soul. “No,” she said softly. “He has not returned to Amaurot.”  
“I see,” the Crystal Exarch murmured. Then, in a much more concerned, caring voice, he asked, “Why do you?” His crimson eyes met her blue, awaiting an answer that did not come. Eventually he spoke again. “Whatever you require, the Crystarium can provide.”

She did not doubt that he believed that. The Crystalline Mean had been more than accommodating, when she had deigned to visit. But she did not go to Amaurot for supplies or a workshop—or indeed any mortal need she could name. She walked among its beautiful spires and stood beneath its unearthly trees, and tried to remember, as she had been bid.

Perhaps someday soon she would exhaust the impulse. When it came to blows once more with Elidibus, mayhap—if it ever did; she suspected that only the host he abandoned had made him bold enough to engage her directly.

She flicked her gaze toward the portal once more, then toward the master of the tower—though it seemed fair to say the tower had mastered him in turn, yoked as he was to its proximity. “Where _is_ Thancred?” she asked. “Do you know?”  
“He and Ryne left on a field excursion a sennight ago. To Nabath Araeng, I believe—to the edge of the Flood.”  
“And Alisaie?”  
“She too is in Amh Araeng, returned to her post at the Inn.”  
“And Y’shtola?”  
“She has elected to remain among the Night’s Blessed in Slitherbough.”  
“So none of them are here,” Shasi said.  
“No,” he agreed.  
Shasi closed her eyes a moment, folding her arms across her chest. When she opened them, she looked upon his crystal-scarred face, and found him frowning, his brilliant eyes downcast, as though he might read answers from the floor. “Perhaps we have other needs than a feather bed and a warm meal,” she told him. “Duties. Desires. Things only we can do. I should return to the Source and see to matters there, since I, at least, am able to come and go freely.” She could feel the tightness of her shoulders, the cords in her neck standing out, and—becoming aware of her own tension—willed herself to take a deep breath, to maintain her composure. “There is still a war unfolding on the Source,” she said.  
“But the conditions for a calamity have passed—”  
“Varis zos Galvus is a mortal man!” Shasi interrupted. “Elidibus may have used him for a cat’s-paw, but he seems glad enough to make war for mortal reasons as well as cosmic ones. In fact, the depths of his self-interest seem to have only grown in my absence, and he and his Hydrae are more dangerous than you know—but you wouldn’t know about the Hydra’s verse in my song, I suppose.”  
“I understand you have concerns you must see to,” said the Exarch. “Would that I could aid you with them, but much of my power is concentrated here. I thought it best that I use them to make this place a refuge—for all of them. For you. What can I do to make you feel more at home?”  
“Nothing,” Shasi said, through teeth she had not realized she had set. “I have a home. This is not it.”  
“Is it Amaurot?” he asked, so blithely that it only made her angrier.  
“No,” she said. “And if it were, so what? I have the right to make that choice.”

He approached then on timorous, sandaled feet, outstretching his good hand toward her. She wanted to slap it away, but merely recoiled, cringing toward the stairs which led upward toward the portal. “Don’t,” she said.  
“Shasi—”  
“X’shasi.” The muscles of her neck ached, and once again she unclenched her jaw. “Do not presume to treat me so familiarly.” Even after everything, she could not look upon his face and see the friend he might have been once.  
“X’shasi,” he acquiesced.  
“You,” she said, the accusation trembling on the tip of her tongue. “ _Took_ me from my home.”  
His brow twisted upward in anguish. “To save your home,” he said, pleading in his tone. “To save this world, and your world, and _you_ —”  
“You took my choices from me!” Her fury had slipped free, and she felt something moving in her sin-stained heart. “You took _them_ from me; you took nearly everything from me!” The edges of her vision blurred, and she held fast to the anger she felt hot inside her—better that than the sorrow which seemed poised to scald her cheeks.  
He only stared at her, stricken. “I had to,” he said, with trembling lips. “I had no other choice.”  
“There is always a choice!” she roared back at him. “Had you but asked me, I would have done all that was required. Had I but known, I would have come running!”  
“I know,” he bellowed back, his voice rising to meet hers. “That’s the type of person you are.”  
“Is that what the stories say?” she wondered, the heat of her anger leaving her, a chill passing in her wake. The tumult within her roared around her ears, and she could feel the dark side of her skin pressing outward against the bounds of her person. She had used this resentment for fuel for so much of the last year, but it had not burned away with the wardens’ Light. “For someone so infatuated with my _story,_ you don’t understand it much.”

He lifted his false hand to his opposite arm, fingers curling about the fall of his robes, over the curve of his bicep. Shasi had not seen and could not guess how much of him had been subsumed by crystal, but if it were no longer there, it need not have been for her to know he was touching a place where ink had marked flesh in a bold, crimson tattoo of familiar design.

“We knew each other once,” he said. “We were friends.”  
“I know that, G’raha,” she spat, making of his name a weapon. “It was not _I_ that tried to deny that past, but I am not the person I was when you sealed the tower. I was not wholly untouched by loss—I endured such things with the twins as I cannot speak of, even now, and we laid Moenbryda to rest—but these were the first drops of rain in the deluge to come.”  
“Forgive me,” he said.  
“I will not,” Shasi hissed, cutting him off. “Not yet. You don’t even know what to apologize for. I had a vision of you once, you know. I might have asked you about it moons ago, had I the slenderest hope you might answer me honestly—I can only pray you have the sense to do that now.”  
He tilted his head to the side, curiosity glimmering in his eyes, stronger still than any other emotion writ in them. “What did you see?”  
She closed her eyes, willing the tumult of her thoughts to slow so that she could pluck the memory from their jumble. She had pondered over it long enough. “You had gone to Ishgard,” she said, “and found it in ruins. You took Edmont de Fortemps’s memoir.” Her eyes snapped open, and Shasi watched crystal glimmer as he frowned. “Did you read it?” she wondered. “Or did you find it distasteful? Too dark, perhaps, compared to the faerie tales they told one another after I was dead?”  
He let his head fall forward a bit, his discolored hair falling forward over his face. “I read it,” he admitted. “I was trying to pinpoint the optimal moment in your timeline to summon you hence.”  
“Then you know,” Shasi said softly, “that things did not happen as your companion said. I was not _on_ Vidofnir’s back. I was atop the spire, looking on helplessly. It was not I that saved that child.”  
The Exarch sighed, drawing up to the foot of the stairs and mounting them so that he did not have to crane his neck to look up at her. “What good would it have done to disabuse him of the notion?”  
“It would have served purpose enough simply to tell the truth,” Shasi said, eyes narrowing. “But you have demonstrated often enough that is not a priority for you.” She took a step back, up another stair, edging closer to the portal. All around her was the hateful blue of crystal, but for that single point of crimson. “It might have allayed my misgivings to know that you at least understood that about me. Tell me, if you had performed the spell correctly the first time, would I have come alone?”  
“Yes,” the Exarch said, reticence hushing his voice.

Shasi shook her head. “Then I would have come alone and failed alone. That is the message I wish you would have taken from the memoir: that I have not accomplished all I did on my own. At least in Ishgard I still had Urianger, along with the allies I made in the city.” Thinking of the elezen, she felt anger prick her anew. “You took my companions from me,” she said, nails biting into her palm. “This is unforgivable twice over—you see only the looming Calamity as a threat upon the Source, but in your attempts to save me you very nearly killed me, and put me through such hardship as you cannot imagine. Were it just myself, perhaps I would find it easier to forgive.”  
“I never meant to rob you of anything,” the Exarch protested.  
“By your own admission, you did!” Shasi retorted. “You would have brought me here alone, without my consultation, and robbed me of my agency and stripped me of my companions. I do not know if that would have been better or worse.” She huffed out an angry sigh. “The only person who thrived here is Alphinaud,” she told him. “Thancred and Y’shtola accused one another at various points of leaving their better selves on the Source, and I can see why! Thancred spent two years in isolation here ere any of the rest of them showed up, and I could see the harm it did him immediately, and even now I feel powerless to turn back the hands of grief. Y’shtola is more reckless than ever, and Urianger … even should I bury all the other enmity I bear you, what you did to Urianger would be enough to make us enemies, were it not so needful that we be allies.”

Crystal hand touched crystal-marred face, and the Exarch brushed his hair back from his forehead, lips parted in a retort that was not yet ready to pass them. “Urianger,” he said, “agreed to do as I ask.”  
“You used him,” Shasi hissed. “’Manipulated’ is not too strong a word—the guilt he bears over this world and its heroes is etched upon his very soul. Of course he did all you asked.”  
“But you have forgiven him,” the Exarch said, and Shasi could hear the pleading in his voice. It reminded her of something … someone she had loved and lost; someone she had barely dreamed.  
She doubted that Myste lived in the pages of the Count’s memoir—or Ardbert, for that matter. “Yes,” she said, trying to master her voice. “In so many words, I have. Because I have absolved him of telling your lies, am I now obligated to forgive you as well?” She shook her head. “Urianger is bereaved. It was in the earliest moments of mourning he first learned of this shard, and set himself upon a course by which he hoped to save it—but it cost the life of a dear friend and the heroes that unwittingly damned this world. And _it was not enough,_ as would have been clear to him the moment he arrived here.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and felt them burning against her eyelids. “His machinations could have killed me twice over,” she said, “and _still_ I find him easier to forgive. Do you know why that is, Exarch?”  
“You know him better than you know me,” the Exarch ventured.  
Shasi nodded once, allowing her eyes to open. “That is part of it,” she agreed. “I know him well enough to trust his motivations even should he not reveal them from the first. Part of it, too, is that we have our grief in common—you will have read why I came to Ishgard; the tragedy that befell me not long after you locked yourself away in the Tower. Urianger was one of very few people left to me, and he shared my sorrow in equal measure even as he shouldered a still dearer loss. He has seen me weep; he has heard my laments; he has borne witness to my lowest moments and my greatest follies. Of all the Scions, perhaps it is he who knows me best, so you chose your cat’s-paw well.” Shasi paused, her stillness disturbed only by the restless flicking of her tail behind her. “I can forgive him because he _understands_ me. Because the moment he can stop lying to me, he does. You had so many opportunities to turn back from this.”  
The Exarch smiled, but it did not reach his crimson eyes. “Would you have believed me?” he wondered.  
“I as good as shut you in that tower myself,” she said. “I knew you had the power to master the secrets of Allag, and I knew its people once dreamed this place would shine as a beacon of hope once more. If I were so loathe to believe you, why would I have asked—I suspected. You knew I suspected, and you denied it.”  
“Forgive me,” the Exarch said once more.

“The thing about forgiveness, Exarch,” Shasi said, “is that it serves little purpose if the offending party does not mend their ways. You have kept me long enough, I think,” she said. “And you have kept the rest of them overlong, for now I go to Garlemald without my best agent. I could have benefited from Thancred’s expertise, but I suppose whatever happens on the Source now is not your concern.” She turned away from him then, focused instead upon the portal and the world that awaited her. “Do not look for me to return to the Crystarium,” she said. “You won’t find me. But you can send Feo Ul if you need me.”  
“Give my regards to Krile,” he said softly.  
Shasi laughed. “Perhaps I will,” she said, putting a hand to the barrier of aether. Just as she stepped through, she murmured, “I cannot imagine what _her_ response will be.”


End file.
